


the case of the temporary madness

by brella



Series: you don't have to worry and i'm too old to try [2]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: F/M, Five Years Later, Future Fic, Supernatural Elements, Teen Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-23
Updated: 2016-03-23
Packaged: 2018-05-28 14:49:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6333286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brella/pseuds/brella
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If you had told Dipper a month, or even a year ago, or even three years ago, that someday Pacifica Northwest would save his life, he probably would’ve laughed awkwardly in your face.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the case of the temporary madness

**Author's Note:**

> I still work on this series, sometimes? I think about writing it, and then I consider that to be enough work re: writing it, and then I don't write it; I just think about writing it. Anyway, most of this is pretty old, but I brushed it up and decided to drop it off here for perusal. 
> 
> Sniping teen Dipper/Pacifica is good.

Dipper’s List of Crucial Summer Updates, Addendum:

  1. Pacifica Northwest is capable of blushing.  



 

 

* * *

 

 

Mabel is putting a Sailor Moon band-aid on Dipper’s scraped knee when it happens.

“I feel kinda bad for him,” Mabel is chatting animatedly in Wendy’s direction, like Dipper isn’t even _there_. “He always gets way more injuries on monster hunts than I do.”

“That’s cuz he’s a klutz.” Wendy snorts. “Cry at me when you come back without a leg, Dip.”

“You guys, I’m _bleeding_ ,” Dipper yells like that will settle something. “I almost _died_ to bring back this unicorn hair; show some freaking respect.”

“Oh, yeah, I’ve got _mad_ respect for dudes who go around bugging innocent unicorns,” Wendy drawls, flipping to the next page of her Wolverine comic. Dipper cranes his neck back to look at her. She has way more freckles than he remembers and her ear has four piercings. “Unicorns who are just minding their own business. Grazing. Blessing virgins. Being mystical. Who _wouldn’t_ think they deserved to get their tails yanked on by paranoid seventeen-year-old boys?”

“It wasn’t like that,” Dipper protests, even though it totally was. “Ow, Mabel!”

“Dipper,” Mabel tells him frankly, setting down the bottle of hydrogen peroxide she’d been pouring on the wound so she can properly squash his cheeks between her hands, “You have been tattooed. Pain is all relative for you now. Whining rights have been _lost_.”

“Oh, yeah, those things are pretty tight, dude,” Wendy comments, dragging her motorcycle boots off of the cash register counter to properly sit forward and survey Dipper’s arms. “Is that all, like, stuff from the journals, or what?”

“Yeah.” Dipper grins toothily, raising his left arm and flexing, setting his sneakered feet against the lower bar of the stool on which he’s seated. “Check it.”

“Whoa, hang on.” Wendy points, frowning. “What’s the triangle guy doing on there? Didn’t he, like—try to rip out your tongue that one time? And almost massacre the entire town, or whatever?”

Dipper loves educating people on this stuff. “Legend _says_ that Bill Cipher cannot look at his own reflection, or any images of himself, else his ability to interact with this plane of existence will temporarily weaken. He can’t watch me if I’m always watching _him_.”

“Dipper is insane,” Mabel chirps, “but pretty smart.”

“Plus, I dunno, it just looked cool or whatever,” Dipper finishes with a wave of his hand.

Wendy grins crookedly, ruffling her own hair as she gets back into her trademark lazy gift shop employee position. “Cool is definitely your middle name nowadays.” She puts on an exaggerated old man voice, high pitched and wavering. “You have come a long way, young grasshopper.”

Dipper is too busy laughing to hear the bell ring over the door. Mabel reacts immediately, the same way she always does when customers are involved (a talent that Grunkle Stan regularly and emotionally commends), bounding away from her stool. Dipper stays on his, gangly legs sticking out at an angle as he settles his heels on the bar, hands planted firmly on the rim of the seat. He _thinks_ he hears girls chatting, but he and Wendy are still too engrossed in seeing who can do a better impersonation of Yoda.

“Hey, guys!” Mabel calls, dragging his attention back. “Look who it is!”

Dipper turns slightly around, head tilting, and freezes.

Pacifica finishes tying her hair off in an immaculate sock bun. Her sunglasses glint on the crown of her head. She’s wearing a pastel pink sweater and leggings and still somehow manages to give off the aura of being more hautely dressed than anyone within a ten mile radius. Twenty, maybe.

She looks bored, but not scathing, which is progress. She’s chewing bubble gum, and it smells like watermelon. There’s a single purple band-aid on her elbow. At the sight of it, Dipper feels his stomach sort of shudder and flop over, a full and clumsy rotation, reminiscent of the time he saw Soos try to make pancakes. He honestly doesn’t know why—maybe Pacifica put poison in the air conditioning system? Is there _no limit_ to how low she will stoop?

“I heard you had some shrunken heads, or whatever,” Pacifica drones, lightly nudging her bangs back into perfection with her middle finger. “Don’t think I came here to hang out, okay; I only have like two and a half hours. I told my dad I was going to get a pedi.”

“How _long_ are pedicures supposed to last?” Dipper blurts out snarkily before he can stop himself.

He regrets it immediately. Talking back to Pacifica has never resulted in anything good, in his experience, no matter how nice she smells, or how the single free and easy smile he’d seen out of her, four years ago, still brushes through his mind on sunny days, _gross_.

He quails when Pacifica shoots a sharp and dangerous look his way, eyes narrowed. Frantically, he locks gazes with Mabel, coiling his body for escape.

And then Pacifica does something really crazy.

She blushes.

Dipper goes slack at the sight—her pointy nose going pink with the spread of it, her jaw slipping just slightly agape. Something fizzles in the air between them, making him gulp against the suddenly raw sensation in his throat.

He doesn’t even notice that he’d decided to walk until he’s towering over her, hands in his pockets, smiling against his will at how she tilts slightly back to keep eye contact, at how flabbergasted she is (by what, he doesn’t know; does he have something on his face, well, whatever).

“And,” she finally says—and maybe Dipper is crazy, but her voice sounds a little higher and softer than it did a second ago, “you are…?”

“Uh,” Dipper answers, a little flatly, but he still tries to smile as amicably as he can. “Pacifica, it’s me. Dipper. Mabel’s brother?”

He doesn’t really know how to describe the progression of the look on her face after that. The jolting up of her thin eyebrows indicates shock, maybe, but the deepening of the flush on her cheeks indicates humiliation of an extremely high caliber; her eyes sort of spark for a second, like she’s impressed, but then she wrinkles her nose in a mix of confusion and disgust, and then she sneers, full of bluster and contempt.

“I should’ve known,” she grinds out, taking a dainty step backwards as though she’s just narrowly avoided stepping in cow manure. Her voice is back to its usual haughty cadence. “Your fly’s open, Pines.”

The strange feeling that something monumental has just infinitesimally shifted leaves Dipper, then. Red at the ears, he fumbles at his jeans to fix the zipper; when he succeeds, and jerks his head back up, Mabel has already dragged Pacifica into the exhibit room.

“You’re unbelievable, man,” Wendy chuckles from behind him.

“Yeah,” Dipper replies faintly, still staring at the empty space Pacifica no longer occupies. “Unbelievable.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

“Admit it!” Mabel yells, knocking a particularly troublesome gnome well over the line of trees with her golf club, using her free hand to wipe some blood away from her swollen nose. “You _like_ her! Like, like, like, like! You’re a shmoop! You _like Pacifica_!”

“Maybe now’s not a great _time_ for that, Mabel!” Dipper barks back, yelping when he narrowly manages to avoid a gnome flying at his face. “What was their weakness again—?”

“I know what _yours_ is!” Mabel singsongs. She does a full pirouette on the next swing, fluid and free. “P-A-C-I-F—”

“ _Mabel_!”

“Leafblowers!” Mabel screams triumphantly, lifting her fists and beaming. “Leafblowers, Dip! Leafblowers! I remember now!”

And Dipper thinks, ducking, leaping over the red-hatted swarm to reconquer the golf cart, that growing up is _so_ not worth forgetting things like that.

 

 

* * *

 

 

If you had told Dipper a month, or even a year ago, or even three years ago, that Pacifica Northwest would save his life, he probably would’ve laughed awkwardly in your face. However, it’s hard to do that whole awkward laughing thing when Pacifica Northwest is the only thing between him and a thousand-foot drop into unfathomable darkness, so just—imagine it; he’ll get back to you later.

A thousand-foot drop, by the way, just to clarify, down to the lair of the carnivorous pterodactyl that probably would have carried him along with it if Pacifica hadn’t grabbed his ankle at the last second. How is her timing both perfect _and_ awful?  

“Ugh, Pines, you’re such a total dunce!” she screams in his ear now, arms straining to hold him up as he kicks and flails desperately, his bulging eyes focused on the dark pit below him. “I am _not_ letting you die before you’re old enough to drink alcohol!” She groans. “This is going to _ruin_ my manicure, you nimrod, I’ll _murder you_ while you _sleep_!”

“Rain check on the murdering, save life now!” Dipper manages to squawk over his hammering heart. “Like, _now_ -now, as soon as possible, that being immediate! Immediately! _Now_!”

“ _You_ try lifting up a thrashing human with nails for brains and I’ll tell _you_ to work on your immediacy, see how you like _that_!” Pacifica shrieks with lungpower that should scare him, or at least shatter his eardrums. “Hold still! _Hold still_ , for the love of—”

Dipper takes a deep breath and does as he’s told—and very nearly throws up when he feels himself start to slip slightly from Pacifica’s grip. With an enormous grunt, she fists her hands into his shirt near his armpits and drags him, slowly, clumsily, back over the edge of the cliff, until she loses her footing and falls backwards and hits the ground and he lands right on top of her.

“Augh, _God_ , you _noid_!” she snarls, hitting him repeatedly with her tiny fists. “Get _off_ me!”

It takes Dipper about three seconds longer than it should. He can feel her whole body move when she breathes. Her perfume smells kind of heady and floral. Her cheek is pressed against the back of his neck and it’s soft.

Ew, ew, _ew_ —

He springs off of her and lands on his hands and knees in the dirt next to her. Coughing, cursing at him, she sits up, rattling off high-pitched and frankly distasteful insults all flung in his direction, brushing the dirt off of her hoodie.

Her—

“Hoodie?” Dipper blurts out before he can stop himself, pointing dumbly at it. It’s black, with a white zipper, and a little baggy on her. Her leggings have a tiny hole in the knee. She’s missing a pink flip-flop.

She scowls venomously at him, folding her arms at her chest.

“Bag your face,” she snaps, and nothing else.

Dipper stares at her for a second. She’s winded, breaths coming in and out lightly but still audibly, and her cheeks are splotchy and red, and her bangs are mussed, and the rest of her hair is in a ponytail. She’s not wearing any makeup. Her toes and fingernails are painted purple.

“I didn’t have time to change!” she adds spitefully, like it’s his fault.

“Before what?” Dipper blinks.

“Before you were dragged into the maw of a raging night beast, _doy_ ,” she retorts. “Nice _job_ with that, by the way. Real brilliant move, going after it by yourself. I thought you and your weirdo sister were always in on that weirdo stuff, like, as a unit. A unit of weirdos.”

“Oh. Yeah, I, uh,” Dipper scratches the back of his head, trying to straighten his hat. “I dunno. I’ve kinda been trying to do stuff on my own lately.”

Pacifica rolls her eyes and groans. “Ugh, don’t tell me you’re going through one of those stupid _prove-your-masculinity_ phases. That is _really_ not your style, Pines. Trust me.”

He barely even hears her over the sound of his heart still roaring in his ears. “You were, like… amazing back there.”

He can’t really tell because the cave lighting is terrible, but he thinks he sees her cheeks go pink instead of exerted red. She ducks her eyes and glares at the ground.

“Yeah, well, funerals are so totally boring,” she tells him, tossing her hair when she lifts her head back up again. “I was _not_ about to sit through another one for the sake of—” She air quotes disdainfully, lowering her voice a sneering octave. “ _Good publicity_.”  

“Or you like me,” Dipper says before his survival instinct can get the better of him, grinning at her.

“Oh, bite me, Pines!” Pacifica snaps, striking a foot out and kicking him right in the shin. Red-white pain bursts from the point of impact and he swears, toppling over backwards. She surges to her feet while he’s down, staring venomously down her nose at him. “Enjoy walking home!”

“Th-Thanks,” Dipper tries to say through all of the unimaginable shin pain, but Pacifica has already stormed away, ponytail swishing, perfume smell fading into the musky cavern air.

And, well, he thinks—she  _does_ have a driver's license. That could be useful for, you know, mystery-solving and oddity-chasing. That could be very, very useful. 

He hears a distant roar from somewhere at the bottom of the pit he'd just narrowly avoided being carried down and leaps to his feet, scrambling for the exit. He can think about that stuff later.


End file.
